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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 2024

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

153 comments
  • Go home Coursera, you're drunk.

    Want to get even better results with GenAI? The new Google Prompting Essentials course will teach you 5 easy steps to write effective prompts for consistent, useful results.

    Note: Got an email ad from Coursera. I had to highlight the message because the email's text was white-on-white.

    How the chicken fried fuck does anyone make a course about "prompt engineering"? It's like seeing a weird sports guy systematize his pregame rituals and then sell a course on it.

    Step 1: Grow a beard, preferably one like that Leonidas guy in 300.

    Step 2: If your team wins, never wash those clothes, and be sure to wear those clothes every game day. That's not stank, that's the luck diffusing out into the universe.

    Step 3: Use the force to make the ball go where it needs to go. Also use it to scatter and confuse the opposition.

    Step 4: Ask God(s) to intervene, he/she/they love(s) your team more!

    Step 5: Change allegiance to a better team if things go downhill, because that means your current team has lost the Mandate of Heaven.

    That will be $200 please.

    • Thanks, Google. You know, I used to be pretty good at getting consistent, useful results from your search engine, but the improvements you've made to it since the make me feel like I really might need a fucking prompt engineering course to find things on the internet these days. By which I mean something that'll help you promptly engineer the internet back into a form where search engines work correctly.

153 comments